M&S Lancaster

Stanleys community centre runs activities and sessions which are designed to improve health and well-being for all its community members. We also offer food support to all our groups swell as weekly food club. Stanleys promotes partnership working and social prescribing as a way of achieving personal and collective growth.

Food for Thought is a not-for-profit community group. We are based out of Father's House in Skerton. Our food club is held weekly on a Thursday 12-1.00 and we provide food for 100 families. Our volunteers come from a variety of backgrounds including community work, academia and self employment. Our volunteers have all had prior experience of running food clubs and working with and in the community. We work with several bodies including Lancashire County Council who awarded us our start up grant and Lancaster District CVS. Our partnership with Neighbourly provides our food club with the bonus of free surplus food which we give to our members free of charge. Also, by running alongside the community café at Father’s House we can provide a share of the surplus food we collect from Neighbourly partners and give the local community a free hot meal. Our association with Father’s House makes us unique in the Lancaster area as we can offer so much more to the residents of Skerton. For example, we donate food to the Father’s House Community Café who then make free hot nutritious meals to feed those in food poverty and the homeless. Father’s House Community Cafe also donates cakes and meals to our food group, so it is mutually beneficial. We feel that this helps us to connect with a different client group to any other food club in the area and makes the food we offer our clients truly sustainable. We are part of the buying cooperative organised by eggcup which gives our members the opportunity to purchase bread, milk and eggs for a nominal price (£1). Eggcup also give us access to HSF funded food. We are in the process of developing links with My Mainway and also Asda as part of their Community Partnership. We run a slow cooker initiative ‘What’s Slow Cooking’. The launch was covered by the local press. The initiative is unique in Lancaster ‘What’s Slow Cooking’ is funded by being successful in gaining a grant from Lancaster and District CVS. We are the first Community Partner with a newly established Hygiene Bank – Lancaster and the Bay. We have been chosen as it has been recognised that we know our members and as such we will be able to provide a more comprehensive service, offering both personal and household cleaning products through this partnership. We have also run a craft group on a Tuesday 11-1 where a hot meal is provided free of charge and we also are in the process of setting up a community garden where local residents can grow edible plants such as potatoes and brassicas.

The community centre is a facility for people of all ages offering a wide range of services and activities to the both the local community and surrounding areas. We work in partnership with other voluntary groups with an aim to improving peoples lives through access to leisure, community groups, education, support into employment and youth provision. The centre receives weekly donations of surplus food from local supermarkets through neighbourly. The donated goods are used in a variety of different ways by our service users. Providing access to food and nutritious meals to our service users is a fundamental part of our working ethos. The financial circumstances of some of the people and families that we work with means that this is a service provided in most of the centre led activities and sessions. During youth group our young people will eat together so that we can be sure of a hot meal that day. Our older people also enjoy a meal as age and disability provide an obstacle for some of them when it comes to cooking. We have a 'take away' table set up in the hall from which centre users are free to help themselves too,. The contents of this table will also include produce from our community garden which is picked throughout the year. Items donated have also been used by our weekly food club at which local residents have access to a bag of food to be used by them and their families. This group is particularly helpful to those on low or restricted incomes who rely on this food to feed them over the coming week. Through a network of partners we receive referrals for emergency food supplies and will try to accommodate these requests when we have surplus food donations available. Many of the families supported by this scheme are known to us as we support them regularly. Thanks to generosity of neighbourly's surplus food donating businesses we are able to ensure that this food and produce is used to support those most in need in our local community rather than going to waste.